The present invention relates to a spring manufacturing apparatus with a reduced number of driving sources, yet capable of precisely bending the spring.
A conventional spring manufacturing apparatus has a wire processing space where the wire is formed into a spring, defined by a front wall of a casing. The spring manufacturing apparatus includes at least a pair of wire feeding rollers that delivers the wire to the wire processing space, via a wire path. The wire fed into the wire processing space is bent by a bending dice mounted on three bending dice mounting sliders, installed so as to move into and out of the wire processing space.
The three bending dice mounting sliders are located on the wire path at a position opposing the outlet of the wire, and symmetrically with respect to a center line extended from the wire path. The three bending dice mounting sliders are respectively provided with a motor serving as a driving source. Controlling the rotation of the motor so as to locate the bending dice mounting sliders at a desired relative position enables forming the spring in a desired shape.
The spring manufacturing apparatus thus structured, however, requires a motor for each of the three bending dice mounting sliders for the positioning. Accordingly, it is difficult to reduce the manufacturing cost, and hence the running cost remains high. From such viewpoint, a spring manufacturing apparatus with a single driving source that drives the bending dice mounting sliders has been developed. In such spring manufacturing apparatus, the driving source directly drives a first bending dice mounting slider. The remaining bending dice mounting sliders are mechanically linked with the first bending dice mounting slider and provided with a removable arm, so that the bending dice mounting sliders necessary for manufacturing the spring can be driven.